Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sunday August 21, 2005 @03:28PM
from the get-a-leg-up dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Richard Menta from MP3 Newswire recently posted an article that describes how the Net has shifted his tastes from main stream radio artists to indie acts he discovered online. Slashdot has run a number of articles dealing with the struggles of independent artists and how the net is helping them. Between the recent payola scandal and the incursion of Big Radio into podcasting the major labels are pushing hard to monopolize what they can. The good news is that Big Music is much slower adjusting to the changes brought about by technology than Little Music and the sky is looking rosier for the independent artist. In a July article, CNET also discussed how things are looking much better for the independents."

yeah, I know it is shameless promotion...but the point is still the same. The net is the best method of distribution for Indie Artists. They can have a worldwide audience at their fingertips. That is what we are trying to provide.

Nope. Why would I want to pay for radio? The only reason I'd want such a service is if they regularly broadcast concerts. That I would pay for. Otherwise, I have plenty of diverse material in my ever-expanding CD collection.

I'm not sure how long it's going to take, but I do see a day when you'll have a decent Internet connection in your car, at which point in time your argument goes away.

For what it's worth, I listen to virtually no music, but I do think that the Internet is having and will continue to have a tremendous impact on virtually any business that exercises control through limited distribution mechanisms. We've already seen this somewhat in the news industry (via blogging) and music/video (through mechanisms like

I'm not sure how long it's going to take, but I do see a day when you'll have a decent Internet connection in your car, at which point in time your argument goes away.

Interestingly enough, the technology is already here. Any EDGE or UMTS connection should be capable of streaming your everyday 128kbps shoutcasts. Even plain old GPRS should suffice for lower bitrates.

All you need is a smartphone (symbian, MS, palm, whatever, many exist already) with headphone out and an mp3 player that can play streams.

While I hate the word, you might want to investigate podcasting. Assuming you have a portable digital music player that plugs into your car, or you an in-car device, you can just download straight to that. If not, then you can set up a script to burn a CDR(W) full of music each morning, and put that in your car.

You miss the two big reasons for radio: real time traffic and weather. Most days the weather I can tell by looking out the window, but sometimes it is nice to know what is coming before I see it. (Is that a tornado and I should pull off and find shelter, or just a storm that just slows me down)

Traffic is big. If I know about an accident that happens after I leave work, but before I get to the road it is on, I can take an alternate route. (though I also need to know if everyone else is taking the alt

Not really a problem, in the UK at least. I don't know about elsewhere, but here most in-car radios have a traffic program setting. If any local station in range sets their traffic news flag then it will interrupt the current station and switch to the traffic news. In modern sets this can be used in conjunction with a CD - it pauses the CD when there is traffic news and starts it again afterwards. Doing this, you could listen to podcasts on CD and have them interrupted for other things. As for news, I

If you're in a largeish city, you're in luck though:
there are College stations. I live in Toronto,
and between the two University stations CIUT
and CKLN plus CBC for intelligent programming,
there's no end of radio. And, most importantly,
they're all commercial-free. I cannot stand
radio commercials. Not even a tiny bit.

If you need a bit of info to understand their difference from ClearChannel [clearchannel.com]: Infinity owns K-Rock [krockradio.com] [WXRK, New York], the station that runs the Howard Stern Radio Show (until he switches to Sirius). Clearchannel discontinued their airings of the Howard Stern Radio Show suddenly one morning on almost all of their stations that had rebroadcast agreements.

Many podcasts are less commercial than radio shows, but it doesn't mean that quality would have to suffer. Net is full of great quality podcasts, like Spacemusic spacemusic.libsyn.com [libsyn.com] and some lowsy low quality ones (and still interesting) like lugradio [lugradio.org]

The concept of "radio", as in the means to relatively easily and affordably address large masses of people, does not revolve around music.

Another very important component is the dispersal of political thought. Indeed, that perhaps overrides the importance of music any day. If it were not for the independence of the current Internet, groups such as the 9/11 truth movement would never have been able to deliver their message to so many people.

But on another tack, most of the music my band plays is with the intent to disperse political thought.
As a rabble rouser for the bulk of my life, i followed in the large footsteps and traditions of Joe Hill and all the other wobbly singer/ songwriters, Woody and Utah Phillips.
http://www.deepwoodsband.com/ [deepwoodsband.com]

Radio stations are controlled by the record companies, they try to force-feed you with all the crap they're trying to sell. Problem is, I'm not interested in commerce, I want to listen to quality music. So now there are these great specialized internet radio's with music I never heard before. Or you can leech months worth of music on your HD from friends, listen to it and decide for yourself what you like. It's great!

Gee, it must be because Apple and big media are in cahoots to smother out all independent forms of media. It's not because millions of people want to listen to ABC, Ebert and Newsweek--nobody ever liked those shows anyway. Right?

Now it's all ABC, Ebert Roeper, Newsweek same shit you see on the newstand. Why waste time with a new medium, if it is the same people delivering the same message.

It's because Time/Warner and company bid on that space on the iTunes site. That's fair enough to me. The whole point of iTunes, from Apple's perspective, is to make money, which the media conglomerates have. The natural progression of this is to find that the top 10 podcast feeds are McMedia. I sympathize, but my advice is to just scroll down

"It's because Time/Warner and company bid on that space on the iTunes site"

Maybe for the banner graphics, but I think the original poster was referring to the top 10 text list, complied by Apple based on number of subscribers.

The explanation for this shift is logical, but not very exciting. As more and more people hear about and subscribe to Podcasts, more generic "mass appeal" popular content is going to get subscribed to by more aggregate people than the devoted fans of the narrow interest casts. When

It (hopefully) will evolve into digital radio over FM frequencies (first starting with a couple as car stereos and home stereos support the digital format) that are streamed off of the internet where radio stations can provide commercial or private content.

I'm not so sure bringing the RIAA into this article added much to the point it was trying to make. The fact that file traders end up buying more music than non-traders is inconsequential if the focus of article is getting music on the web. What about an effort by the artists themselves to get their music out there, like hosting tracks on websites or podcasting? P2P isn't the only way to get yourself heard, and volunteering to distribute your music keeps aside the whole RIAA issue. I agree that the net is mo

A music track is often several MBs. Even if you are just distributing a sample track from an album, it only takes a couple of hundred downloaders a month and that's 1GB/month. Many more, and the bandwidth bill starts to get expensive. Using peer-to-peer technologies, on the other hand, means that the fans each contribute a small amount of bandwidth, reducing costs for small groups. The ideal medium might be a combination of bittorrent and podcasting - the RSS feed links to a.torrent, and the.torrent c

Probably not: there will always be people willing to pay to watch (not really hear) the latest Britney Spears video.
But with the advances in collaborative filtering and machine learning it will be possible to look for good music, based on your tastes and them only. At that point how many artist will really look for an industry label?

The radio will obviously follow. An automatic "intelligent" agent will probably be able to build up a playlist based on your mood and taste.
Let's hope we will not have to w

Payola has been around for many, many years and will certainly be around for many more. If small labels are so foolish as to think that the Sony case will increase their ability to gain radio airtime, it is no wonder that they are a small label.

I have discovered a number of bands/individuals that I never would have heard of through dmusic (http://dmusic.com/ [dmusic.com]) that I never would have encountered anywhere else. There is a lot of cruft to sort through, but quite a few terrific tracks as well. I haven't listened to commercial radio in many years, I just can't find anything worth hearing and what little worthwhile content their is is ruined by jarring advertisements every few minutes. My car radio is tuned to NPR, and Sirius in the bedroom brings in

I can easily imagine a time when the only remaining stronghold of Clearchannel clone stations and their ilk is the morning commute. They might be trying to "monopolise" newer mediums like webradio and podcasting, but it just can't happen because there's no scarcity of broadcast bandwidth (as is the case with radio spectrum).

If you buy the Long Tail [typepad.com] theory, it looks like the media market will become only more diverse as we increase our global bandwidth capacity.

Cumulus' and Clearchannel's profit margins are thin. Satellite and Internet radio will eat away at the remainder, and the two hegemons will fold. Just give it a few years for these institutional sociopaths to die.

I foresee broadcast radio as the province of a few 50,000-watt megastations who have the huge listening audiences to make ad sales profitable, and a handfull of community-supported stations who rely on quality programming. The broadcast market won't support anything else if it has to compete wi

All we need left is something to connect the layman (a.k.a. non-/.) with the indie artists. Something like napster for internet radio. Whoever can create the link will be forever immortalized like that one dude who created napster.

iTunes? It has built-in support for podcasting in the same interface as the music store. I've not used it much, but it seems to be quite layman-compatible (assuming that iTMS is, which it seems to be).

Shawn Fanning did not create napster. His college roommate did; Shawn stole the disk while he was asleep at his keyboard. I forget the roommate's name but this was on the news or something. Or a movie. Err, I mean, some terrorist told me this before he tried to blow up the airport. Or something....

This is a perfect example of a radio show with knowledgable hosts and DJs, well-informed interviews, excellently selected indie music, indie music news, etc. In fact it is a picture-perfect radio show... but it's a podcast.

Are you kidding? This is better than any indie radio I've ever heard! Unless you live in the mecca of cool, you aren't going to hear this fabulous music on your radio dials. Even then, you still won't. Get your advance tracks before anyone else does. Tune in or be tuned out of the up and coming music of the ought generation. Seriously. It's that good. You won't love every song. But that's the beauty of it. There is something new and different for people of all tastes. Enjoy!

Not only is WOXY.com [woxy.com] an independently owned and operated web radio station that is commercial free and has live dj's M-F that play requests, they are also restarting their unsigned band contest as Unsigned@woxy.com [woxy.com] an hour-long show and a podcast for unsigned artists.

And that's why they've tried to stifle the genesis of internet radio streams, by setting the standard licensing rates very high and using patents on both the techniques and the technology to suppress the services. Internet radio definitely has the potential to break the RIAA's monopoly on introducing people to new artists.

It's pretty obvious that people can only like music they have heard, so "The Music Industry" tried to control radio, where listeners could hear music for free (if you consider being forced to hear commercials free) what "The Music Industry" wanted you to buy. In fact, the playlist was often created by a single person at the station who more or less made money from the industry by pushing certain "products".

An artist had two choices. Sell out and let "The Music Industry" take care of marketing/advertising -> distribution and give up large control over their art in their contracts -or- go indie with a smaller label that didn't have the power to really get a large audience to hear the music.

The internet has taken care of one half of the problem. So distribution is now available more or less for free when compared to shipping CD's to retail stores.

What's missing right now is marketing/advertising. You have to get people to hear a song before they can decide they like it or not. Apple figured this out and now that's what PodCasting is about. If you find a PodCast you like, then you are likely to find music there you want... and Apple hopes you buy it from the iTunes Music Store.

But the whole current system is flawed, IMO. I'm certainly in the minority with this opinion, but I view artist, musicians in this case, as part of a service industry. They don't make property, like a chair or a computer, they create music, which is not physical and hence can't be owned. But that's a debate for another thread.

The good news? Big Music is going to die and it doesn't even know it. The bad news? Artist need to switch to a neo-patronage system to get paid when information trading gets to the point that it kills Big Music.

I am an "independent musician". I distibute my music over the web. I know many, many other musicians who do so also.

Most musicians I know are quite good at the art part, and quite bad/clueless at the marketing part (myself included). Marketing is mostly salesmanship. Musicians, for the most part, are not salesmen. Mostly, we dislike salesmen.

If you look at sucessfull bands that came from the indie scene, either they were good at marketing, or had someone on their side that was.

That is what a record label should do. A band should be able to sign up with a label/promoter for a fair cost. Unfortunately the RIAA labels are not this way. Instead of being the Artist's friend, they have turned into greedy little maggots that not only take money from the Artist, but also wants to own their music (copyright). This has worked in the past, but Artists are starting to get wise and use the Internet to get their music out. There are also Independent labels and sites (DMusic.com, CDBaby.com, and Garageband.com) just to name a few that are willing to give the Artist a fair shake.

Hopefully sites like this will prosper and the big labels will continue to lose business.

The thing is, the absolute best word of marketing is simply word of mouth from other fans, and evangelists for you that are not paid by you.So it doesn't matter how many people you pay to market something as it will never really be as effective as people that are not marketers.

So, for a band to do well in the future on thier own, I think they have to (a) produce good music, and (b) be really excited about the band and tell anyone they can about it. If you have a lot of energy regarding your band that coul

The problem, as far as net music/radio/whatever is concerned is PUBLICITY. You may put music on your site (hell, I do) but if nobody knows it's there then you're just having fun.. which I am!
Maybe the bigger problem is that the audience (or maybe the majority of the audience) of music listeners have come to accept it as a passive medium. That's to say it is not something they actually go out and find it is something that finds them. Record companies spend an absolute fortune on marketing and advertising t

They don't make property, like a chair or a computer, they create music, which is not physical and hence can't be owned.

If nobody had to worry about money, or if all artists could get paid AS MUCH upfront for their intangible creation service vs per instance, then they wouldn't need to lean on the artificial scarcity of an (unbalanced) copyright.

People understand that information isn't REAL property, but the current outofwhack social contract is to grant a person not-so-temporary artificial property cop

Agreed. The odd thing is that there isn't really an incentive to create more from owning copyrights. The incentive of artist, it's been my experience, is to create and communicate. It's the distributors that buy the copyrights from the artist who are intent on controlling information as if it were property.Most musicians just want people to hear their music. It's about communication, not money. If they can somehow live off the act of creation, then so much the better.

The real money in music will be in live performance - which has been the case for a while for many bands anyway - it's only been relatively recently that Big Music has found wanna-be artists who are dumb enough to let them take much of a cut of their live revenues.I think we can look forward to a really fragmented music scene - similar to the alternative/indy scene in the early nineties, when there was a lot of stuff about, but when people tended only to stick with what they listened to, and not cross over

I live in Dallas, and the radio here is terrible. We have no good college or community radio to fill the gap, so I've been doing a lot of research on how to get something better on the air here. We have a terrible Clear Channel top 40 "alternative" station here, but from about 89-94 when the station started, it really was an alternative station, playing almost no top 40 and lots of indie.I recently had lunch with the guy that started that station, and probably the most interesting fact I learned was that t

I been riding the indie web music wave for over a year now, and I can say that its better then the radio. Sites like epitonic, webjay, insound, and even cnet's own download.com are allowing indie bands a chance to get theirs names out there, legally. I honestly don't even listen to the radio (for music) anymore. Instead I go to one of the above mentioned sites, or artist/record label site, download some free, legal, (most importantly) DRM-free music, drop it onto my ipod, plug the pod into the car, and bame

It seems/.ers love to throw the term monopoly around whenever there's competition between a large company and a small company. In reality, there are 5 major labels in competition with songs for you to hear, as well as hundreds of smaller labels, and large numbers of garage bands. There is no monopoly on music. In fact popular artists often start on smaller labels, and then, sign with the one of the big 5 when they make it big (REM for instance). Yes, the internet is a good tool for exposure for unknown art

How about "collusion" - all "five major labels" fall under the RIAA. Purchasing legislation should be illegal. What legislation? Oh, I don't know... *cough*DMCA*cough*. Payola? Wait, that's not legal! Oh, boy, oh boy.

When the big boys start using their beatin' sticks on the small guys, don't be suprised when suddenly everyone treats the big boys as evil.

There is a monopoly (oligarchy perhaps?) when the RIAA is in control. Most "indie" labels are distributed by a major and thus are indirectly RIAA controlled entities. The ones that are not are sometimes regional, mostly small market labels that serve a particular genre of music. You won't find the small labels' items on the shelves of many mainstream stores because of the RIAA and their distribution deals with retailers.Small mom&pop record stores are the best bet, but then it depends on where you liv

Last FM [www.last.fm] is a great concept. Basically it uses a system similar to Amazon's recommended links. You download their player (don't worry, open source, BSD license, Mac/Linux/Windows) and you type the name of a band in the box. It then streams music the database thinks is similar. You can vote to skip, ban, or love a track.

When you've done it for a while you'll have your own profile. You can then go and listen to music that your "musical neighbours" are listening to.

75 Minutes http://75minutes.com/ [75minutes.com] offers an eclectic assortment of great independent music in a podcast format. They have both an AAC feed (with chapters and other goodies) as well as an mp3-based feed for non-iTunes users. In addition there are indie news segments and interviews with independent artists. IMO, this show is about as good as it gets on the interwebs and waayy better than anything you'll hear on commercial radio. Give it a shot, you will not be disappointed.

Radio was never concieved in the beginning as a way to give artist exposure, but that's what it ended up as, in addition to being an advertising tool. To be honest, radio is more of a producer's tool, then an artist's tool. It enables a producer to reach millions of people easily. Very rarely do you see an artist who has enough pull or money to break into the radio scene by themselves. The internet is much more of an artist's tool. There is no money needed to get exposure on the net. You can reach an

Between the recent payola scandal and the incursion of Big Radio into podcasting the major labels are pushing hard to monopolize what they can.

The problems with FM radio go far beyond payola. Music Director's no longer pick songs to play because they thing that the song will be something their listeners will think is cool. Music Director's now rely almost exclusively on what the trade magazines (R&R and Billboard) say is popular. The trade magazines get their information from the bigger stations, which pay consultants to pick out songs
The consultants are not picking songs because listeners will think it is something new and interesting and might bring in new ears, but rather, they pick songs based on the idea of 'please, please, we can't lose/offend any of our existing listeners.'

This is a poor business model, as it doesn't bring in new people, and this a big reason radio is losing listeners to the internet.

Stations that only play 250 songs (1 days worth) on a rotating basis is another.

I still like the idea of "DJ" as the one who seaches among the literally thousands of releases (each tuesday in the US) to find the gems. And I like the idea of quality control. And I like the idea of the personality of the DJ being part of that whole experience. And the sort of implied "take my word for it" because in the past they've been right again and again.

Hence the reason why when it comes to music WFMU is unbeatable.

It's still teresterial radio, but it's otherwise available on the internet at 128k for free, of course, you should pledge if you like.

describes how the Net has shifted his tastes from main stream radio artists to indie acts he discovered online.

Individual tastes are always shifting. The internet doesn't really have that much to do with it. It all depends on the individual and their mood. This person would have found new music at some other source (the library, perhaps? Or blasting out of car window at a red light?) because they were in the mood for new music.

Sometimes I go months without listening to anything newer than 1968. I'll run Kazaa for hours searching for obscure pop songs from 1963-1968. It's as if music just stopped in the early 1970's. Others feel the same with perhaps different time periods.

For music period focus, the internet is invaluable. But for just exposure to different music, it's not the best medium. You need to know nearly exactly what you want before you can find it on the net.

A better way to get exposure to different music is to become part of drive share. This is where a hard drive (an older one with maybe 30 Gigabytes) is traded for one that is filled with each sharer's favorite music. Each person swaps an old drive with another person. The drives have the other person's favorite music on it. Each person puts only a gigabyte or so of music on it. Eventually you get a hard drive that has the favorite music of 30 different people with each person putting hundreds of minutes of their favorite music on it. No one makes judgement of the other's selections: no one erases the other's partition: no one hassles with so-called copyright issues.

The old method of music distribution and dissemination is rapidly fading and no realistic model is taking its place. You know that when an industry reaching the point where they trying to put its best customers in jail and extort large amounts of money from them because they can't resolve a pricing issue, the industry is in a lot of trouble.

I'm finding it all amusing. I especially like the part about how if the 'artists' aren't paid, then they won't produce any more quality product. Like if enough people copy Rod Zombie tracks, he's going to go sell insurance. Or if people don't pay $18 for Pink CDs, she's going to get discouraged and become a network applications engineer. Yeah, right... Popular music 'artists' and stars don't really have much choice about what they do, they are going to continue to do it whether they get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars or not. What the RIAA is really saying is that if people stop paying $18 for junk music, the music company executives will actually have to find some way to justify their huge salaries and perk packages. Heaven forbid! The 'artists' will just go back to whatever shithole that they were discovered from.
The real issue with the RIAA is whether music can really be bought and sold anymore. The concept that five people playing the same songs as everybody else with slightly different words and chord patterns can go to a recording studio for a week and a hundred million dollars comes to the record company is simply breaking down. It's dependent on a 20th century centrallized media and distribution model. It used to work and work well; it doesn't anymore. Putting people in prison and extorting money from them isn't going to change anything except cause the occasional music industry lawyer to get shot by people who disagree with the concept that they have to pay a fine for being the one in a million singled out by the RIAA to be fined for downloading some stupid inconseqencial pop song.

Music is like air. Everybody takes it in, puts it back out. It's absurd to claim that somebody wrote a pop or rock song that is basicly the same as the pop and rock songs that have been playing on the radio for the past 40 years. Music is simply part of the environment, no one can realistically claim to 'own' it. It doesn't matter what the law is. This is the new reality.

Every time I turn on that radio in the car, I can barely stay tuned to one station for any amount of time. Generally I come in on the very end of a song I like, or I have to cycle through the same sets of commercial for the LOWEST PRICES OF THE YEAR--AGAIN!I guess that's because I have no loyalty to any one station. I'm loyal to the content, not the provider, and the providers really suck.

'Casts can bring loyalty not only to the content but *also* to the provider, because they tend to be one and the same.